in military service, which was considered a form of labor for the state.
Even in well-organized China, with its highly trained bureaucracy, this cumbersome system worked imperfectly, tending to break down completely every few decades. The Japanese wrote the system into elaborate law codes drawn up on Chinese models. To put it into practice in clan-ridden Japan was a different matter. For a century or so, the system did operate after a fashion in the capital area and in localities held directly by the Yamato clan, but in more remote parts of the country it was a dead letter from the start.
Closely connected with the Chinese tax system was the huge peasant conscript army it provided. China, with its long frontiers and warlike nomad neighbors to the north, needed such large levies, but they were quite meaningless in isolated Japan. A so-called army was created from peasant conscripts of the capital areas where the tax system was in force, but these peasant soldiers never constituted anything more than labor gangs. Despite the creation on paper of a foot-soldier army, the aristocrat on horseback remained the true Japanese fighting man.
The process of learning and borrowing from China was of course not limited to the political field. In fact, what the Japanese were learning at this time in cultural and intellectual fields had much more prolonged influence in Japan than did the borrowed political institutions. The latter for the most part decayed rapidly, and eventually disappeared in all but name, but many of the religious concepts, artistic skills, and literary forms learned during these centuries, far from losing